I’d be interested where you’re getting your data. SteamDB shows an accelerating trend of game releases over time, though comparing January 2026 to January 2025 directly shows a marginal gain [0].
This chart from a16z (scroll down to “App Store, Engage”) plots monthly iOS App Store releases each month and shows significant growth [1].
> After basically zero growth for the past three years, new app releases surged 60% yoy in December (and 24% on a trailing twelve month basis).
It’s completely anecdotal evidence but my own personal experience shows various sub-Reddit’s just flooded with AI assisted projects now, so much so that various pages have started to implement bans or limits of AI related posts (r/selfhosted just did this).
As far as _amazing software_ goes, that’s all a bit subjective. But there is definitely an increase happening.
I got the numbers swapped. Turns out there was an increase of about 40 games between last January and this. Which is exactly what you wouldn’t expect if the 5-10x claims are true.
Also the accelerating trend dates back to 2018 if you remove the early COVID dip. Which is exactly my point. You can look at the graph and there is no noticeable impact correlated to any major AI advancements.
The iOS data is interesting. But it’s an outlier because the Play Store and Steam show nothing similar. And the iOS App Store is weird because they’ve had numerous periods of negative growth follow by huge positive growth over the years. My guess is that it probably has more to do with all of the VC money flowing into AI startups and all the small teams following the hype building wrappers and post training existing models. If you look at a random sample of the iOS new apps that looks likely.
Seriously go to the App Store,
search AI and scroll until you get bored. There are literally thousands of AI API wrappers.
Oh my, this brings me back! One of my fondest gaming memories involves a massive Civilization 3 PBEM match between a number of Civilization fan sites, where we all had private forums and ran these virtual nations against each other. This was way back in 2002 or 2003!
I believe Civfanatics was in it (run by “Chieftess” if I recall), Apolyton (which I was a member of — elected in as Minister of Public Works and had to come up with a plan to clear our pesky jungles) and a number of other sites.
It was such an awesome time. Real diplomacy and trade negotiations between the fan sites while waiting to play our turns. Man, it was fun.
I was also there at Civfanatics watching from the sidelines. Fond memories indeed, and some of those same people laid the foundations for this project.
I didn’t do that stuff but I remember…was it Kryten? Making a multi unit graphic utility, I used it to make and publish some multi units. Fun times. CivFanatics was great.
Point of clarification: llama.cpp is MIT-licensed. Using it downstream (commercially or otherwise) is exactly what that license allows, so calling it a rip-off is misleading.
I've been using GLM 4.7 alongside Opus 4.5 and I can't believe how bad it is. Seriously.
I spent 20 minutes yesterday trying to get GLM 4.7 to understand that a simple modal on a web page (vanilla JS and HTML!) wasn't displaying when a certain button was clicked. I hooked it up to Chrome MCP in Open Code as well.
It constantly told me that it fixed the problem. In frustration, I opened Claude Code and just typed "Why won't the button with ID 'edit' work???!"
It fixed the problem in one shot. This isn't even a hard problem (and I could have just fixed it myself but I guess sunk cost fallacy).
I've used a bunch of the SOTA models (via my work's Windsurf subscription) for HTML/CSS/JS stuff over the past few months. Mind you, I am not a web developer, these are just internal and personal projects.
My experience is that all of the models seem to do a decent job of writing a whole application from scratch, up to a certain point of complexity. But as soon as you ask them for non-trivial modifications and bugfixes, they _usually_ go deep into rationalized rabbit holes into nowhere.
I burned through a lot of credits to try them all and Gemini tended to work the best for the things I was doing. But as always, YMMV.
Amazingly, just yesterday, I had Opus 4.5 crap itself extensively on a fairly simple problem -- it was trying to override a column with an aggregation function while also using it in a group-by without referring to the original column by its full qualified name prefixed with the table -- and in typical Claude fashion it assembled an entire abstraction layer to try and hide the problem under, before finally giving up, deleting the column, and smugly informing me I didn't need it anyway.
That evening, for kicks, I brought the problem to GLM 4.7 Flash (Flash!) and it one-shot the right solution.
It's not apples to apples, because when it comes down to it LLMs are statistical token extruders, and it's a lot easier to extrude the likely tokens from an isolated query than from a whole workspace that's already been messed up somewhat by said LLM. That, and data is not the plural of anecdote. But still, I'm easily amused, and this amused me. (I haven't otherwise pushed GLM 4.7 much and I don't have a strong opinion about about it.)
But seriously, given the consistent pattern of knitting ever larger carpets to sweep errors under that Claude seems to exhibit over and over instead of identifying and addressing root causes, I'm curious what the codebases of people who use it a lot look like.
This has been my consistent experience with every model prior to Opus 4.5, and every single open model I've given a go.
Hopefully we will get there in another 6 months when Opus is distilled into new open models, but I've always been shocked at some of the claims around open models, when I've been entirely unable to replicate them.
Hell, even Opus 4.5 shits the bed with semi-regularity on anything that's not completely greenfield for my usage, once I'm giving it tasks beyond some unseen complexity boundary.
I work on a React based web app in my Day Job and have genuinely enjoyed it.
That said, it always feels like so much boilerplate to get up and running for a greenfield project (and things like NextJS or even TanStack Start add a lot of things that might be overkill for a simple web app).
For some vibe coded side projects with Claude, I’ve been working with just using handlebars templates with Express and it has been pretty glorious!
I don’t think I’d recommend building a complex web app this way, but for some mild JS interactivity, form submission, etc, handlebars works.
Bonus: I find it much easier to get 100 across the board on Lighthouse scores this way.
For what it’s worth, I’ve used Vue and don’t like it (stuff like custom directives that are nonstandard html, not as explicit about event handling and data flow, etc).
I’ve seen a lot of buzz (particularly on HN) about Svelte but have lacked the motivation to try it.
I wish more people would criticise Svelte but most people just don't care because it's irrelevant. It's like complaining about Backbone or something, not worth the effort.
I wanted to like Vue but when I tried it I didn't. For writing ordinary business applications I wish React reified lists more than it does, but what I like about React is that I know how to draw absolutely anything with it, including 3-d worlds, see
I've tried both and disliked both. Already before I did I was wary of patronizing-feeling statements like these, though. The Vue community in particular, or at least the vocal pockets of it I've come across online, seem like a web dev counterpart to the Rust evangelism strike force.
> it always feels like so much boilerplate to get up and running for a greenfield project
This is why I love Bun + React. The setup is so easy I can do it off memory. I always hated boilerplate, templates etc. so this is a huge selling point for me.
Been going at it since 2003! It's a blog but links to all my open source work, and as of late, I talk a lot of various projects I work on and random rabbit holes I fall into.
This number can mean wildly different things depending on the size of your house (and location).
I live in the Bay Area, CA in a 1,500 square foot house and consumed 7.8MWh in 2025 and 7.6 MWh in 2024.
Digging a bit more into our solar system data:
We produced a bit over 9MWh in solar each year and it looks like our Enphase batteries discharged 2MWh each year.
Hah! I’ve done something similar. I created a bunch of pre-defined voice messages with Eleven Labs and then have a script that randomly calls them via the same hooks.
nice, next step is to write a custom function that derives a useful but repeatable message from the hooks and put a little cache in front the Eleven Labs message gen. For example: "In {Project}, Claude needs your permission to run {command}"
That way you can stay comfortably in the free plan with awesome voice messages
I have a different voice for my laptop compared to my main computer and can also pick per project
I’ve long felt the same way. I think this will eventually happen but there’s going to be a lot more starving artists and other producers of emotionally meaningful works before we get there. The interesting problem down the line will be how to verify someone is human or something is human made.
I have nothing to base this on except anecdotal experience, but I really think this current generation (Gen Alpha?) is going to hate AI and anything related to it. One recent example: a friend’s kid’s third-grade class recently visited our local city hall and had a mock city council meeting with the mayor. One of the kids asked if we could “ban ChatGPT from the city.”
This chart from a16z (scroll down to “App Store, Engage”) plots monthly iOS App Store releases each month and shows significant growth [1].
> After basically zero growth for the past three years, new app releases surged 60% yoy in December (and 24% on a trailing twelve month basis).
It’s completely anecdotal evidence but my own personal experience shows various sub-Reddit’s just flooded with AI assisted projects now, so much so that various pages have started to implement bans or limits of AI related posts (r/selfhosted just did this).
As far as _amazing software_ goes, that’s all a bit subjective. But there is definitely an increase happening.
[0] https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
[1] https://www.a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-week-the-almighty-cons...
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